Parties and Persuasion

A letter in response to Louis Menand’s article (November 12, 2012)

Louis Menand, in his review of Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain,” writes, of the C.I.A.’s covert funding of American cultural activities during the Cold War, “Bill Haley and Frank Zappa likely did more to inspire the dissidents in Eastern Europe than Jackson Pollock or the writers at Partisan Review” (“Bloc Heads,” November 12th). Partisan Review was indeed funded by the C.I.A. for a time, and, even if it lacked the force of popular music, it had some effect in the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet bloc: in its summer issue of 1962, it published my article “The Coming End of Anti-Communism.” I argued—with considerable lack of originality, since many thinkers felt as I did—that anti-Communism had become an ideological obsession that blinded policymakers and the public alike to the possibilities of change in the Soviet empire. I was teaching in the United Kingdom at the time, and had considerable contact with intellectuals in the Soviet bloc’s universities, research centers, and journals. The American debate contributed to an enlargement of the discussion in those countries, and had some effect in West Berlin, an outpost of the American-led bloc. There Mayor Willy Brandt assembled a group of thinkers to prepare the project that Egon Bahr, the spokesman for the Senate of Berlin, later called “change through rapprochement.” I do not know if the C.I.A. officers responsible for funding Partisan Review had these consequences in mind, but it was certainly a good use of covert funding.

Norman Birnbaum

Washington, D.C.

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